III. Angkor
The ruins of Angkor Wat amid the forests and farms near modern-day Siem Reap city contain more than a thousand temples. These vary in scale from modest mounds of rubble to the majestic Angkor Wat itself, the most significant Khmer architecture site and possibly the world’s largest single religious monument. Angkor was a subject of intense interest to Robert Powell, and his numerous field trips to the area resulted in a critically acclaimed collection of artworks. Highlights include a towering silk cotton tree slowly enveloping the inner gallery at Ta Prohm (which cannot be photographed due to a physical obstruction). In addition, Rob’s magical work depicting the linga, yonis and deities carved into the sandstone bed of the ‘River of a Thousand Linga’ beautifully captures the essence of flow, as the water transports the power of the inscriptions down to the Siem Reap river and the temples of Angkor.
When Rob goes for fieldwork he seeks out his vision in the surrounding reality. He looks for revelatory signs of a culture that talks of ages as well as of modernity, a thread that connects the present with the past by a meaning that is not lost, or a meaning that is lost but should not be forgotten. When he paints, his vision goes beyond the reality in front of him. The use of frontal perspective, the complete absence of anything else but a single subject, the absolute disembodiment of the themes he paints, achieved by applying these simple concepts extract values that go beyond the physical existence (the reality) of his landscapes and monuments. His fluid and balanced style has been refined over the years to reach an extraordinary limpidity. Looking at his paintings, one sees his subject in a formal perfection. But what one sees is no mere depiction of an intriguing or special subject of dignified significance. His skill in the rendition of the subjects leads his work to a realism that is visionary, and which transcends into absolute abstraction. It is pure abstraction or rather a noumenon incarnated in the physical world.
Extract taken from Roberto Vitali’s Introduction to ‘Earth Door Sky Door’.
